SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE

Spook the Machine: Gamified Exploration of Human Imagination of Machine Fear

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 14, 2026 · UTC

What happens when AI machines express fear? Do humans engage differently depending on how they express it? And what does it take to design for affective human-AI interaction? We present Spook the Machine, a gamified platform where participants generate images to frighten AI agents endowed with personality-driven phobias. Machines respond with emotional reactions ranging from calm analysis to begging for mercy, and a gallery of successful scares becomes visible to subsequent users. In a public deployment during Halloween 2024, 832 participants created 15,719 artifacts across 89 machines in a $2

Read original source ↗ Open in workspace

recordType

paper

region

Global